Analysis: Money's retreat home threatens globalization

But they also acknowledge that, unlike the 2008-2009 shock, much of the retreat looks structural this time around due to regulation and could have a longer-lasting impact.

Lars Thunell, head of the World Bank's International Finance Corporation, which helps finance private sector development in emerging economies, says the European bank pullback from trade financing in particular was still a big worry and new bank rules such as Basel III were a key problem.

"There is a credit crunch or something very close to that going on. Basel III is aggravating the problem by asking for even more capital, disproportionately increasing the capital ratios for trade finance," he said, adding that trade finance should be classified as a low risk activity.

"Total bank deleveraging was $500 billion in the first quarter of this year. These are big numbers. We are trying desperately to get Asian bank syndication, to get them involved. It's proving difficult."

Yet some question whether the passing of high watermark in global finance was necessarily all bad and questioned whether the Greenspan faith in more efficient allocation of world resources as a result of more global finance was misplaced.

BIS Economic Advisor Steve Cecchetti told the central bank forum's annual meeting at the weekend that financial globalization was only great up to a point.

"For most people, the term globalization means cross-border trade in real goods and services -something that we would all agree has brought the greatest benefits to a large number of people."

"But this real side of globalization relies on financial intermediaries to fund the trading of all this stuff across borders. And the recent crisis showed how problems both on and off the intermediaries' balance sheets can have very large, very real and very bad implications. Many of us have started to ask if finance has a dark side."